The stars align

Or how one queen's exile ended and another's rule began

In the middle of a wood so thick and so deep it was very nearly a forest was a small house, built of thatch and wood and daubed grey clay, which had a most foreboding aspect. A small, black crow of a bird sat on its perch outside the house. It did not caw, but sat sinisterly silent, its feathers ruffled and wan. There was a door to the cottage, from which the once-white layer was peeling away as the years went by.
Inside, the cottage consisted of one room, undivided. Smoked meats and sausages hung from the rafters, along with a wizened crocodile carcass. A peat fire burned smokily in the large fireplace against one wall, and the smoke trickled out of the chimney far above. There was a raised bed, large as a king’s canopy, and a smaller plain, wooden bunk not far from it. There were cooking implements, and a large wooden cage, currently empty, in another corner. There were windows too filthy to see through, and over everything was a thick layer of oily dust.
The only thing peculiar in the house was a fountain in the middle of the room, water pouring from the eyes of a statue of a beautiful nymph into a not large basin around it.
The house belonged to an aged woman, a bent and broken grey-haired crone of a thing, and sometimes a young fair lady could be seen serving her. She took to sleep on the bunk, to make the supper, to set snares in the wood for small animals and hunt the odd game, to draw water up from the depths of the fountain, for it was indeed surprisingly deep. The elder woman spoke little.
There was another woman in the little house. She was slim, and tall, and with a waterfall of jet black hair, and amused. The hall she inhabited was many times the size of the cottage; the floor was of onyx, and the pillars were of obsidian, and from the chandeliers small amethysts glowed with a faded purple light. There was a courtyard behind her, with a garden of purple roses, open to the sky, and stars hung in the night above.
A fountain played in the courtyard, the water rolling and falling from a statue of a nymph, her eyes gaping holes, the falling water mimicking the waves and movement of the woman’s hair. Clean, black water poured from her eyes into the pool below, shimmering and shaking the stars.
The tall woman, and her hall, were in the black mirror that was the disturbed water in the fountain basin. The bent crone was all alone in the woods - she was the witch Arsianna. The woman in the mirror was also the witch Arsianna - but whether she was the daughter to the old woman, or her shadow-self, or her past self, or her future self, or whether only the peasant cottage in the woods was real, or if, somewhere, the witch lived in a black hall, with a fountain in the shape of a nymph mourning amidst the courtyard of stars, none knew for certain, and none but the witch could ever say.
On this day, the servant girl came in from the woods, carrying a squirrel, its throat a splash of red. She placed it on the dusty chopping board and took a sharp knife of black stone. She cut it around at the arms and legs and neck, then, with one hand, she pulled the skin off the creature, as if pulling a child from its bedding clothes, and she dropped the naked thing onto the wooden chopping block. “Please?” she asked of the old woman, for she knew not how these things worked, at least not as well as her.
The crone, rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, said, “Might as well, but your hand is steady where mine is not. I will help you read.”
The younger woman picked up the squirrel by the head, and sliced it from neck to groin. Its innards tumbled out onto the cutting board, red and purple and plum-coloured, intestines and vital organs like wet jewels on the dusty wood.
She gasped, “Could… can it be? You must read this” Then she pushed gently at the guts with the knife, and gasped once more. The crone in the rocking chair pulled herself to her feet. (In the mirror, a tall woman stretched and rose from her massive throne.)
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
(In the mirror, a tall woman approached her fountain and peeked into the surface at an angle, trying to spot what was transpiring at the dusty table in the cabin.)
“Look,” gestured the young woman, pointing with her knife.
The crone’s eyes were the colourless grey of extreme age, or so they appeared, and they quite liked to appear as they were, so she squinted at the organs on the slab. (The tall woman could have also looked at the stars above her head, which were at this moment arranged suspiciously alike a squirrel's entrails... or was it perhaps the other ways around?)
“At last,” she said, and after a short pause “About time,” she added.
“Does that mean, then, that we are to go find it?” asked the servant girl.
The old woman walked, painfully slowly, over to a high and dirty chest of massive build, and bent over. She took a carven wooden box from the bottom most part after having rummaged for a good while, and carried it over to her servant. It was locked with an intricate pattern, as if vines had ensnared it in their tight grasp, only they could not have for they were vines of metal gold. Each of the women put a hand on the box, then the one who had carried the box opened the lid from under the vines who were quickly moving away from the clasps. Something shined with a dime purple glow in the bottom. “And good thing you found them, too.” said the crone, for those were the lost eyes of the nymph, taken long ago when the wood she lived in was still beneath the sea and was indeed no wood at all.
“It is you who told me, my lady, what to look for, all those years ago.” said the young one, and with that she gently picked up the pair of amethysts. They were soft to the touch and it was scary to even hold them, for one tight grasp and the gems would be done for, yet her steady hands held on to the crystals.
She passed them onto the old woman, who slowly approached the basin of the fountain, and held out her hand above the water, two purple stars shining in her palm.
(In the mirror of water, a tall woman held her hand above the basin of the significantly larger fountain, until two purple gems fell on top of her palm from below.) Both of them, the tall woman and the bent crone, lodged the gems inside the gaping holes of their statues. There was a shivering and a shuddering at the centre of all things, and the water stopped pouring. The surface of the water mirror calmed and cleared.
(Now, no woman was staring from the water, only the nymph was there, no longer crying.) In the cottage, the servant girl stared, hope and calm and joy mixing in her faces, at a slim and tall and proud, handsome woman with a black waterfall of a hair and purple eyes and red lips.
“My exile is over,” she said, “and… oh my, but this place is so much worse in reality You let your queen live like this?” The young woman’s face blushed and her eyes pierced the dirty wooden flooring, but without bending the head or apologising she answered back “You insisted so.” She strode to the large wooden chest, and produced from it a dress fit for royalty.
“Lovely” said the witch. She tossed it onto the bed, and pulled off the rags and tatters she had worn as an old woman.
“Now, where is my glorified stick?”
“I planted a tree around it centuries ago.” explained the servant girl, who was in fact neither a girl any more, nor a servant, but her most devoted and deadly protector, the Lady Valla. “The Ring was attracting too much attention.”
With that, the two women set out toward the outskirts of the wood, and then southward, to witness the birth of an angel child of great importance. One of the women walked just to the side of the main road, for the path of redemption did not cross paths with that of normal men, and the other walked under the main road, in shadow memory of it, for that was the path she had chosen a long time ago.
Back in the cottage, a nymph with purple eyes slowly shook off the stone skin that had trapped her for time beyond counting, and stepped into the water of the fountain and into the starlit courtyard. Back in her true and tiny form, the fairy queen perched herself onto the onyx throne and smiled deviously.